I’m against retrospective box sets on principle. If I’m a big fan of an artist, I own everything he or she has released and probably a few odds and ends picked up on the Web along the way as well. Invariably, the contents of a career-spanning release will be 90% redundant with what I already have.
For that reason, I initially decided not to buy Ben Folds’ 3-disc set, The Best Imitation of Myself: A Retrospective.